Tag: 1950s

The Beauty and the Dragon (美女と怪龍, Kozaburo Yoshimura, 1955)

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A clever princess takes advantage of a courtly crisis to save the kingdom and arrange her own marriage in Kozaburo Yoshimura’s adaptation of the well-known kabuki play Narukami, The Beauty and the Dragon (美女と怪龍, Kabuki Juhachiban: Narukami – Bijo to Kairyu), produced in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Zenshinza kabuki troupe and starring many of its actors. Scripted by Kaneto Shindo, the film mines a deep seam of irony in the classic tale while allowing its heroine to take centre stage outwitting most of the feckless men from the palace with some clever manoeuvring and utilising the key asset of her femininity.

In a meta touch, Yoshimura opens in a kabuki hall where young lord Toyohide (Chiyonosuke Azuma) is called to perform a dance for the regent, Mototsune, only the show is soon interrupted by a procession of peasants who’ve come to protest the ongoing drought. The earth is cracked and the rivers run dry, but still they are told that they will be informed about the outcome of their petition at a later date. The peasants clearly believe that the emperor really is a god and expect him to fix this problem as soon as possible but in private Motosune is irritated if perhaps accurate in stating that the weather is not their responsibility and they can’t seriously be expected to deal with it. Annoyed by the noise of the protests around the palace, he orders that the peasants be sent away though his courtiers are more sympathetic and know that the peasants simply have no one else to turn to for help. If something isn’t done they will have no choice but to escalate their rebellion.

But as it turns out, the problem actually is their responsibility and is rooted in the misogynicistc patriarchy of the feudal world along with a dose of courtly intrigue. When shinto priest Narukami (Chojuro Kawarasaki) was consulted about the birth of a royal child and prophesied that it would be female, he was hired to alter its destiny and miraculously changed its sex to male through the power of prayer. In return, he was promised that a shrine would be built for him but now it’s 30 years later and he’s sick of waiting. Accordingly, he’s taken the Dragon God who brings the rains hostage and refuses to release him so the rain can return until he gets what he was promised. 

It seems that Mototsune has a very bad habit of promising people whatever their heart desires but conveniently forgetting about it once the job is done. This time though the problem is that disgraced prince Hayakumo (Kunitaro Kawarazaki) stopped the building of the shrine in fear of offending a rival temple, Ezian, which contains a large number of very intimidating bandit monks. Hayakumo is intent on using the courtly chaos to improve his own position, hoping that other lords will fall from favour leaving a space for him to fill. He’s also been obsessively courting princess Taema (Nobuko Otowa) who refuses him because he’s so obviously oily, and in any case she’s in love with Toyohide but can’t marry him seeing as he is already betrothed to another woman whom he does not care for. In a bizarre twist of fate, a scholar insists that the only way to break Narukami’s magic is by learning to read a scroll that once belonged to Taema’s grandfather so they charge her with deciphering it offering to give her whatever her heart desires if she ends the drought which is of course Toyohide’s hand in marriage. 

The ironic thing is that Taema doesn’t for a second believe that reading the scroll will make any difference to anything and quite clearly thinks the scholar they brought in who said it would is a charlatan who actively looks down on her. Yet she, like everyone else, does in fact believe that the cause of the drought is the Dragon God’s imprisonment and Narukami’s dark magic. Advised by her trusty maid, she learns to see opportunity in what could otherwise be a dangerous situation and ably out manoeuvres the foolish men at the court. She wields her femininity, the reason they discount her, as a weapon against the repressed masculinity of Narukami who is said to have been a monk since childhood and has never touched a woman. 

After getting her maid to do a sexy dance for his underlings so that they get drunk and pass out, she then sells Narukami a tragic love story pretending that she simply wants to wash some clothes that belonged to her late husband. Essentially she seduces him, but also targets his weakness in his repressed desires as a monk causing him to transgress his vows and in effect break his own magic by destroying his powers. On seeing her bared ankles he faints, and then ends up telling her how to break the curse after becoming drunk and randomly assuming they are now married. 

As she’d somewhat dangerously told Toyohide, the real problem is that the Regent is weak. Indifferent to the fates of his people and in any case an ineffective leader, he invites intrigue in the court. Yet court itself is weak precisely because it is rooted in patriarchy and defined by male weakness. Even Taema’s beloved Toyohide is preening and jealous, suddenly irritated to discover that Hayakumo had been courting her while later suspicious that she will be alone with Narukami. He was also denied romantic freedom in an inability to escape the marriage arranged for him by his father at three and reliant on Taema finding a way for them subvert the feudal order and be together. The play in fact ends with the rage of a scorned man as the aptly named Narukami is transformed into the god of thunder and vows vengeance against the woman who humiliated him. 

Taema, by contrast, is able to seize control ridding herself of Hayakumo while securing her marriage to a man she choses (the betrothed bride is herself similarly freed and appears not to mind the dissolution of her engagement having had no particular feelings for Toyohide, a man she barely knew) in addition to saving the kingdom along with the lives of peasants by unleashing the Dragon God. Having begun in the theatre, Yoshimura soon moves out to the court and then the country but eventually cycles back for the climactic dance of anger with which the film closes as if echoing a howl of pain from the wounded feudal era circumvented, if not ended, by a clever woman leveraging her only sources of power in a world defined by corrupted male authority. 

Twilight Saloon (たそがれ酒場, Tomu Uchida, 1955)

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A generational divide echoes around a beer hall filled with a defeated sense of bonhomie until finally finding a point of rest in Tomu Uchida’s elliptical single set drama, Twilight Saloon (たそがれ酒場, Tasogare Sakaba). The melancholy title captures the feeling of finality which seems to overhang the bar but equally the shift that is taking place as the old must decide whether they will allow the young to be free or forever trap them with the legacy of their own mistakes. 

The tensions are obvious as a once feared military colonel nicknamed “Demon” Onitsuka (Eijiro Tono) strides into the bar cutting a slim, anxious figure evidently a shadow of his former self. Puffing out his chest, he lives on memories of past glory claiming that though he may now be a lowly estate agent, he will rise again should the occasion call and will never lose his soldier’s spirit. Kibe (Daisuke Kato), a regular at the bar, is excited to run into him, his former commanding officer, and evidently still holds Onitsuka in some esteem but the pair of them seem ridiculous, even a little pitiable, as relics of the wartime generation unable to move into the post-war era. Onitsuka has a minor apoplexy when the table of students across from them begin singing a communist song explaining it as evidence of the absence of morality in the contemporary society. Somewhat embarrassingly, he and Kibe begin singing along to what they thought was a classic military ballad sung by someone outside only to abruptly realise that it is the communists once again. Strapped for cash, Onitsuka makes an abrupt exit leaving a confused Kibe to chase after him yelling “put it on my tab.” 

“Put it on my tab” might as well be the life philosophy of regular patron Umeda (Isamu Kosugi) who unlike Onitsuka and Kibe is wracked with guilt over his wartime experiences and has dedicated the remainder of his life to making amends by paying it forward. Once a famous painter, he feels he sullied his art by wilfully depicting warfare in a manner that sought to glorify it and may have led others astray ultimately costing them their lives. Umeda feels he no longer has a right to practice his art and has made a sacrifice of it in atonement, his earnestness leant a poignant quality by the fact that he is played by Isamu Kosugi who had himself starred in a propaganda film co-produced by Nazi Germany. 

Yet he’s far from the only one who’s abandoned or compromised his art because of what he sees as a moral failing. All knowing, Umeda recounts the history of accompanist Eto (Hiroshi Ono) who he claims once lives under a different name and returned from abroad to found a revolutionary opera company only to be betrayed by his protégé who left to set up his own revolutionary company taking Eto’s wife with him. Eto later stabbed her in jealously and like Umeda has lived the rest of his life in quiet contemplation slumming it in this backstreet bar while training up a new protégé, Kenichi (Takuya Miyahara), said to be the son of a former bandmate. Eto is a vision of defeat, Umeda remarking that his time has most likely come, walking around in a Russian tunic unable to let go of the past. Emi (Keiko Tsushima) is much the same. Once a promising ballet dancer she feels she’s lost the right to dance after becoming a stripper apparently because of a bad man who later breaks into the bar and slashes her arm with a knife echoing Eto’s dark crime of passion. 

This might in part be why she is so keen to ensure that Eto will not prevent Ken from taking advantage of a valuable opportunity because of his own jealousy and resentment. The offer comes from Nakaoji, the leader of a national opera group and the man who once betrayed Eto though as the snippy “intellectuals” at another table point out he may once have been a “revolutionary” but is now an old man and has in effect become the establishment. The dilemma brings things full circle, the generational divide which once existed between master and pupil has now been eclipsed by a turn of the wheel. Eto cannot help but recognise Nakaoji, the cause of all his suffering, but Nakaoji does not acknowledge him and after all he has another name. 

Umeda pleads with him to allow Kenichi to go, not to ruin his life in the same way his was ruined by holding on to his pettiness and resentment as the man who took all from him returns to take his surrogate son too. His call is to those of his generation who bear the responsibility for wartime folly that they should accept that the world now belongs to the young and it is their duty to nurture them while setting them free to pursue their own destiny. The young customers in the bar are universally cheerful, still drunk on the exuberance of youth while those a little older are mostly defeated and melancholy, meditating on their own failed revolutions unable to move forward or let go of the past. 

Yet the youngsters who work there aren’t quite so happy, barmaid Yuki (Hitomi Nozoe) caught between the posturing of current and former gangster boyfriends while simultaneously discovering that her mother has been taken ill. She lost her father in the war and her home to the bombing and claims she has nothing other than the love of Masumi (Ken Utsui), a young tough who wants her to abandon her mother and schoolgirl sister to go with him to Osaka. Umeda adds 3000 yen to his tab, Yuki’s monthly salary, when the manager vacillates over granting her request for an advance to pay for her mother’s medical care seeing as they no longer even have rice at home. Later he runs into an old journalist friend who simply gives him the same amount of money from his wallet as if it were mere pocket change. The fact that Yuki doesn’t go with Masumi is not because she is afraid to or constrained by the burden of her family but an active choice to embrace her responsibility to others over her personal desire much as Umeda has already been doing. 

This maybe a twilight place, peopled by the hopeless and downtrodden, but there’s life here in all of its confusing randomness. A young man at one point runs in and jumps over the balcony to the stairs eventually chased by an older one, an incident otherwise unexplained just like the minor argument between a woman clutching a cat and the man who may be a patron of sorts who also brush through the bar. Uchida gives the snobbish left-wing intellectuals quite a kicking in their pithy discussions about existentialism and mocking of the students for trying to actually do something rather than just talk about it even if it’s singing in the street. Shot as if the action were unfolding in real time, the camera floats around the saloon as if it were itself a ghost lighting on the small moments of action that contribute to the incongruously warm atmosphere before ending up more or less where it started with a man singing on stage to an empty room. Even so, it does it with equal measures of hope and melancholy as age quite literally retreats and surrenders the space those who may still fill it.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Nightshade Flower (夜来香, Kon Ichikawa, 1951)

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A couple who met briefly in Manchuria are reunited in Kobe five years later but find their joy short-lived amid the vagaries of the post-war society in Kon Ichikawa’s tragic romance, Nightshade Flower (夜来香, Ieraishan). The film takes its name from a song “夜来香” known as “Ieraishan” in Japanese, a transliteration of the Mandarin pronunciation (yèláixiāng) in katakana, which was released in a Chinese-language version in Shanghai in 1944 performed by Manchurian Japanese actress Yoshiko Yamaguchi (山口淑子) who also went by the names Ri Koran/Li Hsiang-lan (李香蘭) and later Shirley Yamaguchi at various times in her career. A song of lost love, it seems to echo a sense of despair among the wartime generation who cannot reconcile their pasts with the post-war present. 

Akiko (Asami Kuji), a sex worker, first meets Seki (Ken Uehara), an army doctor, when he pulls her out of the way of an oncoming vehicle in a crowded market place in Northern China in June, 1944. As she is dressed in cheongsam and angrily shouts at him in Mandarin, he assumes her to be Chinese and carries on along his way while she remains ambivalent about the encounter especially as the sleeve of her dress has been torn. In any case, it’s clear that the situation has become precarious and most of the Japanese population are preparing for evacuation. The owner of the brothel where Akiko and her friend Gin (Harue Tone) are employed has hopes of carrying on her business further behind the lines where army bases are still in operation though the pair would prefer to head home as soon as possible, jumping off the repatriation truck organised for them by the madam with the intention of returning to the city and boarding the next one bound straight for the mainland. 

But Gin falls off a cliff and injures her leg, leaving Akiko to go in search of a doctor incongruously rocking up at Seki’s medical clinic. Though she is originally unwilling to have him treat Gin, she soon comes around and the pair begin seeing each other with Akiko pledging to stay behind after putting Gin on a truck. Nevertheless the pair are separated during an air raid with Akiko believing that Seki has been killed in a direct hit to the shrine they were sheltering in when he left their foxhole to check on a crying baby. Five years later, Seki has returned to Kobe to look for Akiko but has had no luck while staying with the family of one of his men, Toshio (Yuji Kawakita), who has fallen into post-war despair and given up his promising future in medicine to peddle black market drugs with shady fixer Kameyama (Reikichi Kawamura). 

The crisis comes when Seki realises he is losing his sight, apparently a delayed reaction to the head injury he sustained in Manchuria which was not fully treated due to the war’s end. Though he reunites with Akiko, he believes that he can no longer have a future with her because of his impending blindness and in fact that his life is now over. Akiko meanwhile has also fallen into despair. Believing Seki was dead she gave up on the idea of finding him and has returned to sex work, she and Gin working in a small backstreet bar and living in adjacent rooms of a rundown tenement block. Seki had always known that she was a sex worker, but she believes he may now reject her because she has failed to live up to the promise she made him of living a more “honest” life ironically because without him she had no reason to do so. 

Meanwhile, Seki is intent of saving Toshio whom he had first met as a naive private openly crying over the death of his mother having picked up a venereal disease after losing his virginity to a sex worker in an attempt to overcome his grief. Toshio is an embodiment of the despair felt by young men who went to war as innocent teenagers and are filled with disillusionment and confusion. Though Toshio is luckier than most who struggle to find work in the difficult post-war economy, he came from a middle-class medical family and if he finishes his training of which he only has a year left he would inherit his father’s clinic, he no longer sees a future for himself and actively rejects his privilege as an act of self-harm by taking up with Kameyama and becoming involved with crime. He resents his father for remarrying soon after his mother died, taking the family maid as his second wife, and is reluctant to marry their nurse, Chiyo (Chiaki Tsukioka), who is also Kameyama’s younger sister, as everyone expects him to despite otherwise carrying on an affair with her which later results in a pregnancy. He says that he wants to earn his own living and be his own man but claims he cannot see the bright future Seki speaks of for him and continues along a dark path of crime and vice. 

The constant rumblings of the train along with its flickering light strongly foreshadow the tragic denouement but also hint at the automatic motion of society that damns the trio and frustrates their attempts to move on from the war and find happiness in its aftermath. Even so, to modern eyes the motif of Seki’s literal blindness which robs him of the ability to perceive a happy future with Akiko cannot but seem a little ableist even as Akiko points out that many men lost their sight in the war but are living good lives with wives and children and that she does not see his disability as a barrier to their ability to make new lives for themselves in the post-war society much as he doesn’t regard her past in sex work as a reason to reject her.

Even so, Seki is dragged into the post-war morass after becoming involved with Kameyama in a futile attempt to save Toshio only to discover that Kameyama has betrayed them by getting them both to work on the same job as a payment for a debt taken out by Seki on Toshio’s behalf to free him from his life of crime. Ichikawa embraces a sense of melodrama with frequent closeups and an underlying theatricality, but also captures something of post-war confusion in the noirish fog that surrounds Akiko as she considers one last job to pay for probably useless medical treatment to save Seki’s sight. The cruelty of the ending is in its way too difficult to bear but perhaps apt for the view from 1951 in which the possibility of escaping the legacy of wartime corruption lies only in painful memories. 

The Eagle and the Hawk (鷲と鷹, Umetsugu Inoue, 1957)

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Strapping sailors meditate on revenge and forgiveness while trapped aboard a moribund cargo ship in Umetsugu Inoue’s otherwise charming musical youth drama, The Eagle and the Hawk (鷲と鷹, Washi to Taka). One of several films Inoue released starring muse of the moment Ishihara, the film uses the boat as a kind of metaphor for a reluctance to deal with the unfinished past as several of its crew members are actively engaged in a self-imposed limbo wilfully remaining in a transient space floating between two harbours with no plans to disembark. 

This is most obviously true for the zombified Ken (Kinshiro Matsumoto) who wanders around the boat in a depressive daze unable to get over a girlfriend who left him for another man though as it turns out the bosun too is hiding out at sea waiting for the statue of limitations to run out on the murder of his lover 30 years previously. When two new recruits show up from the sailors union despite only one having been requested, many are under the assumption that they too are running from something on land though the boat itself is a confined environment from which there is no real escape so it’s also an ideal space for confrontation. 

The thing they may be running from is the murder of the boat’s chief engineer in the film’s noirish opening sequence in which a middle-aged man in a sailor’s cap is stalked by a youngster in jeans before being knifed with a ceremonial dagger. If they were running from that particular crime, it might be ironic that they chose this particular boat but then as the murdered man’s son, First Mate Goro (Hiroyuki Nagato), discovers the dagger was part of a set and the other one’s owned by the captain who seems very alarmed by the whole affair. Meanwhile, the captain’s daughter, Akiko (Ruriko Asaoka), has secretly stowed away along with Akemi (Yumeji Tsukioka), the heartbroken former girlfriend of one of the two new guys, Senkichi (Yujiro Ishihara). 

Women are regarded as unlucky on board, and it’s not difficult to guess why with Goro offering strict instructions to the new guys not to try anything with Akiko while one of the other sailors later attempts to rape Akemi with a palpable desperation existing within the crew. There is also a degree of homoerotic tension between the two new guys, the other being Sasaki (Rentaro Mikuni) who typically walks around shirtless in a pair of tight jeans and works hard to give the impression of having a mysterious past all of which leads Senkichi to suspect he’s an undercover cop possibly there after him or one of the other crew members though unbeknownst to (almost) everyone there is another crime in motion on board. 

As usual, it’s the past that’s come calling with Senkichi on the boat ironically running towards rather than away from a confrontation while others desperately try to cover up their crimes or deflect their responsibility for the dodgy dealings of their youth. Both Senkichi and Sasaki immediately remark that the boat’s a “junker” as soon as they get on board, implying that it too is on its way out, its disrepair a sign of its captain’s lack of respect and care for ship and crew alike. Then again, it seems the crew were intent on drinking half the cargo, most of them clearly happy in their work and enjoying a pleasant sense of camaraderie even on this crummy ship and its presumably not quite above board trip to Hong Kong which might hint at why Akemi shows up in cheongsam though for stowaways both women seem to have brought extensive wardrobes which in all honesty are not particularly well suited to life at sea. 

In any case, the boat becomes an unexpected place of healing and forgiveness largely brokered by manly magnanimity as Goro, on learning the truth behind his father’s murder, accepts that the killer’s motivations are “understandable” even while cautioning them against the fallacy of revenge which he insists will only create more hate and violence. He’s also fairly okay with Senkichi romancing his girl, Akiko, who sadly tells him she sees him more like a brother and isn’t interested in marrying him even if that’s what her father also expects neatly reflecting the dynamic which arises between Akemi and the lovelorn Ken who begins to cheer up and consider leaving the boat to open a transistor radio shop only for Akemi to describe him as a little brother while continuing to chase Senkichi despite his interest in Akiko. An expressionistic storm scene provides some divine justice, but also provokes a bittersweet romantic resolution which suggests it’s time to get off the boat and the face the past but with a kind of cheerfulness for the future otherwise at odds with the rage and violence of the original crime. Of course, this being a vehicle for Yujiro Ishihara, Inoue works in a few romantic scenes with his ukulele and a mournful song about the moon and ocean but finally sends him back to dry land a little more “grounded” for having found his sea legs.

The Angry Street (怒りの街, Mikio Naruse, 1950)

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As its opening text explains, Mikio Naruse’s The Angry Street (怒りの街, Ikari no Machi) takes place in a world in which a love of justice and faith in others has been crushed under foot. That might equally apply to any other of Naruse’s films and well enough reflects his generalised philosophy that the world in which we live betrays us, but in this case it’s more than usually true as he adopts the trappings of film noir to consider the series of reversals that have taken place amid post-war chaos chief among them class and gender. 

Sociopathic student Shigetaka’s (Yasumi Hara) primary motivation is to earn money for his family, once upper middle-class but now fallen on hard times, but he’s also engaged in an act of class warfare taking revenge on the “nouveau riche” who he feels have usurped his class privilege. His chief weapon is his good looks along with his seductive charm which he puts to full use on the dance floor flirting with naive young women to whom he sells sob stories of his poverty to extort money out of them. He and his friend Mori (Jukichi Uno) have an “agreement” that what they’re doing’s alright as long as they only take advantage of the women financially rather than sexually though at this point Shigetaka seems to have little interest in that anyway insisting that women are just business to him so he little cares for their feelings. 

Their sense of class resentment is rammed home by their mocking of their classmates who have to do “humiliating” jobs to support themselves such as selling lottery tickets in the streets. Trying to get them to attend a meeting about student employment, their classmates describe them as “privileged” suggesting they may feel it’s not their problem because they don’t need to work little knowing that each of them is impoverished and dependent on exploiting women for their income.

There is however also a gender reversal in play as Shigetaka misogynistically takes on a feminised role, playing the gold digger in attempting to manipulate women, who are now in a position of power, into supporting him financially. He even tells some of them that he’s being forced into a financial marriage by his “old-fashioned” family, playing the damsel in distress and hoping that his target will swoop in to rescue him. When one of the women writes to his home after he abandons her, his grandmother is scandalised by the idea that he might have formed an attachment to a woman to whom he had not been formally introduced but equally that he might have been frequenting “effeminate” places such as dance halls. Unmanliness is something he’s accused of several times but also the tool which he uses to seduce women who are taken in by his feminine features and graceful dancing. Closely echoing Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, it’s near impossible not to read both Shigetaka and Mori as queer coded and the relationship between them filled with homoerotic tension as Mori looks on in jealously while Shigetaka goes about his business seducing naive young women they’ll swindle together. 

A point of crisis arrives when the pair bite off more than they can chew in getting involved with a woman who is slightly older and sophisticated in her dealings with men. An independent woman, Tagami (Yuriko Hamada) claims to be a dentist but actually makes her money through smuggling and the black market if drawing her line at drugs. Shigetaka thinks he’s using her, but Mori warns him she’s really the one in charge and playing him at his own game planning to drop him once she’s got what she wanted which in this case is his youthful flesh (realistically the only thing he could possibly offer her). Tagami draws him into a wider and more dangerous world of crime than he’s equipped to deal with just as Mori receives twin blows that break the spell and encourage him to want out of Shigetaka’s schemes firstly in discovering that one of their targets, Kimiko (Mayuri Mokusho), is the sweetheart of an old war buddy, and then into running into Shigetaka’s earnest sister Masako (Setsuko Wakayama) who is the film’s de facto moral authority pulling him away from Shigetaka’s dark machinations back towards a more conventional morality. 

In a series of flashbacks, he remembers more innocent times before the war when he too sold tickets on the street and worked in a shop washing windows while going on innocent dates with Masako. The implication is that it’s his wartime service along with the world he came back to that have filled him with nihilistic cynicism while he later says that he indulges in Shigetaka’s schemes as a means of staying close to him and earning his favour. But Shigetaka is already far too corrupt, filled with class resentment over his lost privilege along with a deep-seated misogyny as a reflection of his sense of emasculation in this new world in which young women wield significant economic power. Kimiko in particular is brash and insensitive even aside from her naivety remarking on the piles of money that turn up at her home every day before virtually throwing cash at Shigetaka with seemingly no thought as to how that might make him feel even if he weren’t conning her in offending his pride and masculinity. 

Mori wonders how he can save himself if Shigetaka remains so irredeemable and is instructed by Masako that they must work together and live honestly though even she hangs on to her ideas of social class scandalised by the revelation that her mother too has begun selling things in the street, in her case knitted socks which is a fairly labour intensive activity for an incredibly small profit margin. Echoing film noir, Naruse opens and closes with scenes of the present day city teeming with life yet in a way that seems more ominous than exuberant even in the myriad dance halls where youngsters come to look for love but soon find themselves lost amid the contradictions and confusions of a rapidly changing city.

The Green Music Box (緑はるかに, Umetsugu Inoue, 1955)

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An incredibly surreal musical kids adventure, The Green Music Box (緑はるかに, Midori Haruka ni) saw the film debut of future Nikkatsu star Ruriko Asaoka who in fact took her stage name from the character she plays in the movie. She was born in Manchuria in 1940 as Nobuko Asai (she retains the first character of her surname but the second “oka” or “hill” is also inspired by the “faraway” in the Japanese title). Her father was a political secretary but the family was extremely poor and her entry into the film world came about through an open audition for the role of Ruriko in the film adaptation of a serialised novel for children by Makoto Hojo which would be produced by Takiko Mizunoe and directed by Umetsugu Inoue. Junichi Nakahara who handled the costume design for the film personally picked Asaoka out from the 3000 applicants reportedly saying “this is the girl” after seeing her in makeup. 

A classic children’s adventure movie, the film nevertheless has a strong theme of loneliness and displacement as each of the young protagonists either has no parents or has in some way been separated from them. Ruriko’s father is a scientist who left for a research project in Hokkaido a year previously and has since stopped responding to her letters. Missing him, Ruriko uses a green music box he had given her as a present as a means of floating off into a surreal dream world on the moon filled with children dressed as bunny rabbits who sing and dance with her. Later she teams up with a trio of orphans who have left their orphanage in search of adventure as well as another girl a little younger than herself, Mami (Noriko Watanabe), who has run away from the countryside to look for her mother in Tokyo. At the film’s conclusion all the children have happy family homes, Mami now living with her mother and the three boys adopted by Ruriko’s family meaning that she’s no longer lonely with her brothers now beside her as they all take a trip to the moon and a nation ruled by love, justice, and peace. 

Before all that, however, Ruriko and her mother are kidnapped by a spy, Tazawa (Kenjiro Uemura), claiming to be a colleague of her father’s. Explaining that Professor Kimura (Minoru Takada) has been taken ill, he bundles the pair into a car but takes them to a secret lab in the middle of nowhere where Kimura is being held and attempts to use them to blackmail him into giving up the scientific research he burned on learning that Tazawa belonged to a foreign power explaining that his creation could greatly benefit the world if used peacefully but cause great destruction if not. He manages to sneak the key to his research into Ruriko’s music box and tells her to escape with it though at the film’s conclusion he’ll decide to burn it anyway resolving that it’s too dangerous were it to end up in the wrong hands. 

Such dark events are not exactly unusual in children’s films, though the level of violence is surprising. Ruriko’s mother is taken off and hanged by her wrists while the foreign spies whip her. Though much of it occurs off screen, the whip cracks and screams are audible to Ruriko and her father while we also see her spin and twist, writhing in agony before falling silent perhaps having died as Ruriko comes to infer from the eerie quiet. Later, during the chaos at a circus which is also a front for international espionage a large goon slams the head of one of the children, Fatty (Hideaki Ishii), repeatedly into a table though he appears relatively unhurt and soon fights back cartoonishly by hitting him on the head with an iron bar. 

It’s not really clear why the spies operate out of a weird circus which is also seemingly guilty of copyright infringement given the various Disney-inspired papier-mâché masks lying around, but it is strangely scary for something meant to entertain small children including a surreal performance by Frankie Sakai in a brief cameo as a clown beckoning the kids towards the circus tent. The film was also Nikkatsu’s first colour movie using the short-lived Konicolor method and has a slightly sickly, washed out effect that lends an additional layer of discomfort to the brightly decorated circus environment. In any case, Ruriko and her friends are eventually able to triumph, regaining the music box and even convincing the police that the circus guys really are foreign spies even if it’s partly down to the otherwise unexplained reappearance of her parents who are in fact alive and well. In some ways melancholy, appealing to a sense of loneliness in post-war children who either may have become orphaned or are otherwise separated from their parents, the film ends on a more hopeful note in championing the sense of family that emerges between the children themselves through generational solidarity in offering a happy ending that might seem overly optimistic but nevertheless returns the kids to the kingdom of the Moon Queen and a happy world of love, justice, and peace. 

The Eleventh Hour (どたんば, Tomu Uchida, 1957)

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The problematic working practices of a post-war coal mine are thrown into stark relief when five men are trapped underground during a collapse in Tomu Uchida’s tense rescue drama, The Eleventh Hour (どたんば, Dotanba). Based on a TV play which was itself inspired by real events, the title alone tells us that we can expect a happy ending even if it’s somewhat undercut by the cynical quality of the fanfare with which it is greeted. Nevertheless, it’s clear that the mine itself reflects a dark side of the contemporary society even as it rocketed towards an economic miracle at least on one level fuelled by coal. 

The Towa mine is a small concern run by the owner, Sunaga (Yoshi Kato), who was a miner himself in his younger days, and the chief engineer Kusaka (Shin Tonomura). In the opening scenes it becomes apparent that they are having difficulty running the business effectively while chasing lucrative large-scale contracts. Kusaka pulls Sunaga aside and attempts to warn him that recent attempts to fit a replacement support beam have caused the structure to shift with the effect that it has begun leaking water. The implication is that Sunaga has attempted to cut corners and endangered the miners’ safety. He barely listens to Kusaka’s complaint before barking at him that it’s his responsibility to take care of, and he must be aware of the cost implications involved seeing as he more than anyone knows how hard it is to run this kind of business. 

Unfortunately for him, a sudden rainstorm spells disaster when the mine begins to flood. Some workers still underground are able to escape thorough a support tunnel that connects to another mine, but five are trapped at the other end having managed to climb to a higher shelf above the water. In the rain-soaked soil, some of the above ground structure also begins to collapse, while to his credit a distraught Sunaga calls in the police and miners’ union as soon as possible rather than trying to cover up the disaster to hide his mismanagement. 

For all that, Sunaga is not a stereotypically exploitative mine owner so much as a bad businessman possibly in over his head though as a former miner he should have known better. On the one hand, he had only just found out about the unstable support arch and could not have fixed it before the disaster but as he himself agrees he bears the ultimately responsibility for the way the mine was run which includes skimping on repairs and inspections. More than anyone else, he wants the men to be rescued alive and later tearfully tells his wife that he has considered suicide but is now resolved to sell the mine and his own home to compensate the families should the worst happen. Kusaka later does try to take his own life after witnessing the rescue effort flounder, a Buddhist priest later suggesting that his act may have been intended as a kind of human sacrifice as if he could save the men’s lives by offering up his own. 

Then again, the way some of the men put it it seems like some mine owners view the compensation money for workers killed on the job as a kind of fine they’re prepared to pay to maximise profits. The film briefly introduces the circumstances of the some of the men and their families, one a husband and father who asks for an advance on his pay because his wife and daughter are ill with something that could turn out to be measles. The amount of the compensation money isn’t clear, but may not be enough for a widow to raise a five-year-old daughter to adulthood. If these men die, their families may die with them. Other relatives waiting for news include an elderly man anxious for his only son, and a grandmother waiting for her grandson who only went to the mine to have a look around before potentially starting to work there. 

In the case of the young Yamaguchi (Shinjiro Ebara), the film hints at the way the industrialisation presented by the mine has disrupted local communities as farmers’ sons leave the land for the promise of better pay for working underground. Yamaguchi is taking the job because his father is ill with some kind of neurological complaint, possibly caused by industrial pollution, and he has argued with his brother presumably about money and the responsibility of earning his keep. While underground, he runs into a friend of his father’s, Banno (Takashi Shimura), who tells him that mining is not a job you can do for life and he himself seems far too old to be doing such physically strenuous work though he is the only one almost able to stand when the men are eventually lifted from the mine. 

A veteran miner, Banno too is perhaps complacent. He smokes underground and blows the cigarette out after every puff but only to avoid carbon monoxide rather than a potential explosion. Trapped underground twice before, he does his best to comfort the other men while reassuring them that their colleagues are working to rescue them as they speak. Most of the mine workers from the surrounding area have indeed come to help, along with a specialist rescue team from Tokyo, though they make little progress with the tools available to them. As a journalist puts it, small enterprises don’t have access to the same resources as large corporations and cannot simply order in larger pumps or better diggers. Many of the workers want want to give up with the main support coming from the korean miners from a neighbouring town though they get little thanks for the efforts. After overhearing a frustrated member of the rescue team employ a racist stereotype to describe them as lazy drunks only after money, they withdraw their labour. 

Sunaga is later forced to go back to the Koreans cap in hand with a personal apology, but though some of them are personally sympathetic they remark on the level of discrimination they’ve faced for the entirety of their careers and aren’t sure why they should help Sunaga now considering the way they’ve been treated. On a side note, standard workers protections would not apply if they were killed or injured during a rescue attempt meaning they’d be risking their families’ lives as well as their own for men who are almost certainly already dead. It’s not surprising that they overwhelmingly vote not to help leaving a dejected Sunaga devoid of all hope. 

Nevertheless, they eventually reconsider reflecting that if they were trapped underground they’d want to believe someone was coming and if they don’t come now then they won’t have any right to expect them to. It is workers’ solidarity that eventually saves the miners, from winch operator Michi (Masako Nakamura) who refuses to leave her post so that the men won’t feel “abandoned” to those who arrive to rejoin the rescue effort just when it seems the most hopeless. The solution to cracking the mine is found only by listening to a former employee who hints at its dark history in reminding them of a secret support tunnel sealed up after the war once military equipment had removed.

It might be tempting to read an allegorical message into the solution being the need to blast through the buried wartime past to rescue the men trapped on the other side though it may be a bit of a stretch. In any case the action outside is also somewhat ironic. As the mine collapse becomes national news and attracts rubbernecking crowds, a man turns up to sell ice cream, while journalists also report on the event from the close by. They seem broadly hopeful, but are also looking for a good story and all too quick to report on Kusaka’s suicide attempt. When the men are eventually rescued, they order a helicopter to drop confetti over the surrounding area (possibly unhelpful to local farmers) along with a bouquet for each of the men. Uchida had some experience of working in a mine during his time in Manchuria which had permanently ruined his health and had first hand knowledge of how a mine works and what happens when something goes wrong which explains the otherwise naturalistic opening sequence laying out the conveyor belt design of the complex as the coal is picked and transferred into pick up trucks that will take it to its new owners. It is however “dark and wet like hell” underground, a place that ideally no one should have to go and that all should eventually be rescued from. 

Wind, Woman and Road (風と女と旅鴉, Tai Kato, 1958)

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Tai Kato joined Toei’s Kyoto studio in 1956 having made his directorial debut at the independent production house Takara Productions in 1951 shortly after being letting go from Daiei in 1950 during the Red Purge (he had been chief secretary for studio’s the labour union). Heavily influenced by and a great admirer of Daisuke Ito, Kato had a passion for chanbara and jidaigeki which were Toei’s mainstays at the time, but even while making what were essentially programme pictures his approach was anything but conventional. With 1958’s Wind, Woman, and Road (風と女と旅鴉, Kaze to Onna to Tabigarasu), Kato embarked on what would become a signature style of “realistic” period drama otherwise at odds with the formulaic nature of the genre. 

As he would continue to do, Kato instructed his cast not to wear makeup and while casting kabuki actor/chanbara megastar Kinnosuke Nakamura insisted on a more modern performance style than the sometimes mannered theatricality of the traditional samurai film. Ginji is cocksure young man living on the road after being kicked out of the hometown he is now travelling towards because of a crime supposedly committed by his long absent father. On the way, he runs into Sentaro (Rentaro Mikuni), a middle-aged man recently released from prison who is struck by his appearance and immediately asks how old he is realising that Ginji is about the same age as his own son who died as a result of a fight. 

The two begin walking together and Ginji tells Sentaro that his village sends gold to the governor around this time every year as a bribe to get lower taxes which doesn’t make a lot of economic sense but evidently works for them. Last year, the gold was stolen by notorious bandit Hanzo the Shark (Eitaro Shindo) and two villagers were killed during the robbery. Ginji half jokes about teaming up to steal it, and then playfully attacks Sentaro leading the entourage escorting this year’s payment to flee in terror leaving the gold behind. Sentaro encourages Ginji to take the money back to the village, but he is later shot by the returning villagers who think they must be Hanzo’s henchmen pulling the same stunt as last year. 

Unlike the typical chanbara hero, Ginji is petulant and resentful. He has a very modern way of speaking and is rebellious in character as you might well expect him to be given his life experiences. The other villagers are not happy to see him and continue tar him with his father’s brush, sure that the son of a thief can’t be any better while Ginji pines for his late mother claiming that the villagers’ harassment along with the inability to support herself economically led her to take her own life. Once a member of Hanzo’s gang he vacillates between a desire to be accepted by the village and that to take his revenge on it. Sentaro meanwhile is determined to save him, regretful that he could not save his own son from the life that he had led as a yazkuza and petty criminal. 

There is a persistent sense that everyone here is at heart a wanderer. The doctor’s daughter Ochika (Yumiko Hasegawa) who develops a fondness for both men relates that she was lured away from the village by an itinerant actor and fell into a life of ruin before returning to discover that her mother had passed away. The headman’s adopted daughter Oyuki (Satomi Oka) with whom Ginji falls in love tells him that she too is an orphan, her father was a medicine pedlar who dropped dead in the village which then took her in. Echoing a sense of rootlessness in the post-war world, they are all in someway displaced and looking to restore connections which have previously been broken but largely failing or unable to do so. Ginji is torn between his criminal past and the reformed future offered to him by the more positive paternal relationship he develops with Sentaro who, unlike his own father, is readily accepted by the village which is unaware that he previously spent time in prison. 

The final showdown takes place in a windswept clearing filled with Kato’s trademark mist as Ginji finally picks a side only to realise that that in the end he will always be a wanderer, a rootless figure whose only home is the road. Kato shoots a little higher than he would subsequently but still rests a little lower than the norm, emphasising a sense of destabilisation in Ginji’s volatility along with a painful longing that keeps him a lonely soul lost in the fog and on perpetual journey towards a long forgotten home. 

Yellow Crow (黄色いからす, Heinosuke Gosho, 1957)

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A small family struggles to repair itself after eight years of wartime separation in Heinosuke Gosho’s post-war melodrama, The Yellow Crow (黄色いからす, Kiiroi Karasu). Rather than focus directly on the legacy of the traumatic past, Gosho takes aim at war itself in making plain that the family’s problem is the time that was stolen from them each in a way forced to address the gulf between the idealised family life they may otherwise have had and the post-war reality. 

As the film opens, nine-year-old Kiyoshi (Koji Shitara) is sketching with his class at a temple. His teacher Miss Ashiwara (Yoshiko Kuga) is a little worried about the strange picture he’s drawing, noting that where once he had been a happy child painting cheerful pictures in vibrant colours now he only uses black and yellow and there’s unsettling quality in his composition. Still, trying to comfort him she tells Kiyoshi not to worry and that he’s free to draw whatever he likes, only later showing the paintings to a child psychologist who advises that these colours are often used by children who are anxious and lonely usually because they’ve lost a parent in the war. Only, Kiyoshi is lucky because he has both a mother and a father, his dad having been recently repatriated from China after being interned as a prisoner of war. 

In a sense it’s Miss Ashiwara’s misconception that the family must be happy because they’ve been so fortunate that lies at the centre of the conflict. Mother Machiko (Chikage Awashima) and father Ichiro (Yunosuke Ito) are so keen to get back to “normal” that no one really tries to address the obvious problems of their situation merely to reassume the lives they led before the war. For little Kiyoshi who wasn’t even born when his father left that sense of normality is very different and necessarily disrupted by his father’s return in what can only seem like an intrusion into closeness he had previously shared with his mother. 

Where another director or screenwriter may have told the entirety of the story from Kiyoshi’s point of view, Gosho pulls back to show us the way the adults struggle and suffer in their confusion and disappointment. On the surface, it does not seem that Ichiro has been particularly affected by his wartime service, rather the problem is in his frustrated attempts to reintegrate into a society which is entirely different from the one he left. He himself is older, and is perhaps acutely aware that he is a stranger to his son at first hurt by his shyness and reluctance to acknowledge him but then consumed by a sense of failure in a working life that leaves him little time to bond with his son leaving Kiyoshi with yet another sense of rejection. Meanwhile though his job was kept open for him, the nature of the business has changed. His boss is much younger than he is and has no interest in training an old timer he thinks is only really there as a goodwill gesture. As his friend points out, had it not been for the war he’d be a manager by now but as the boss puts it he’s returned to Japan “too late”. 

All of this adds to his sense of displacement and contributes to his increasingly harsh treatment of Kiyoshi, constantly discouraging all of his interests such as his fascination with animals and talent for drawing telling him only that he should be studying useful things like maths and science. His parenting style is evidently much more authoritarian than Machiko’s had been, often taking the view that Kiyoshi has been spoiled and needs some discipline instilling in him. But Kiyoshi reads his father’s treatment of him only as rejection, that must think he’s a bad boy and not want him. The resentment he feels only grows when the parents have another child, Mitsuko. It’s obviously much easier for Ichiro to bond with her than the already grown Kiyoshi while Machiko is both weak from the birth and mindful of a new responsibility all of which leaves Kiyoshi feeling pushed out and unwanted. He often takes refuge at the home of the kindly woman next-door, Yukiko (Kinuyo Tanaka), and her adopted daughter Haruko with whom he rescues animals, including a wounded crow, much to his father’s consternation. 

Always the wise observer, it’s Yukiko who finally tries to coax Machiko towards a resolution to challenge her husband’s authoritarianism. After his father accuses him of being a threat to Mitsuko and tries to shut him in the shed overnight, finally releasing his pet crow, Kiyoshi tries to run away and later returns to Yukiko’s house where he asks her to adopt him. Listening in secret, Machiko is heartbroken realising that they’ve been going about this all wrong, too busy trying blindly reassume the lives they had before when they should have met each other with more compassion and understanding trying to listen to Kiyoshi, who can admittedly at times be difficult and unreasonable unwilling to recognise when he is in the wrong, rather than instantly scolding him. Machiko’s story perhaps fades into the background, but she too is struggling having realised that her hopes that everything would finally be alright now that Ichiro has returned were misplaced while caught between her husband and her son with a baby daughter to care for trying to keep the peace if nothing else.   

Gosho apparently chose yellow after consulting with child psychologists* and filmed in full colour to make the most of Kiyoshi’s attempts at artistic expression while capturing his youthful sense of loneliness and displacement, but equally treats his parents with a degree of sympathy for their own confusion and disappointment. Ichiro is not a bad man and often trying his best but frustrated, admitting that he would have liked to simply forgive Kiyoshi and get closer to him as his father but for whatever reason found himself lashing out in misplaced anger. The message for the post-war society is then one of generalised compassion, that there’s no point blindly trying to reassume one’s life as if nothing had happened and patience and mutual understanding will be necessary to repair the bonds that war has corrupted. Thus it is Ichiro who has to change, dropping his authoritarian distance in deciding to be kinder to his son finally going out to look for him when he tries to run away in the middle of a storm returning the colours to Kiyoshi’s world as he begins to feel more secure in his familial connections in the knowledge that he is loved and wanted as a child of the new post-war generation. 

*Arthur Nolletti Jr., The Cinema of Heinosuke Gosho: Laughter Through Tears, pg. 185

Ghost Man (幽霊男, Motoyoshi Oda, 1954)

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Employees at a small nude modelling agency find themselves in the firing line when a “bloodsucking painter” escapes from a psychiatric institution in Motoyoshi Oda’s adaptation of Seishi Yokomizo’s Ghost Man (幽霊男, Yurei Otoko). Though produced by Toho and helmed by the director of The Invisible Man, the film does not particularly make use of special effects and as it turns out, Ghost Man is just a creepy name for a weird villain rather than an accurate description of a supernatural threat. 

Even so, you’d expect someone who runs a modelling agency to be on high alert after hearing that a crazed painter who is a danger to women is on the loose, but the manager of the Mutual Art Club simply assumes it must be an eccentric artist thing when he’s presented with a business card from “Ghost Man” Sugawa. Ghost Man is dressed in an unsettling outfit and is immediately rough with the model he picks out, Keiko, all of which you would think would have the manager thinking twice about allowing her to go with him. Some of the other girls urge her to turn the job down, but Keiko is the breadwinner for her family and work has been thin on the ground so she agrees to take it only to realise Ghost Man does indeed intend to kill her on arrival at an abandoned house way out in the country. 

“What a single woman has to do to earn a living, it’s both thrilling…and terrifying,” one of the other women, Ayuko, tells her boyfriend Ken (Yu Fujiki) after she quits the agency to become a stripper and decides to take to the stage despite knowing that Ghost Man may try to kill her during the show. Her words hint at a transgressive frisson of danger which she at least has chosen to embrace, an icy glint in her eye as she encourages Ken to pay close attention to her performance which she claims will be “wonderful”. Nevertheless, it also makes clear that the work the women do at the agency is necessarily unsafe given that it involves travelling to the home of a man they don’t know where they will be expected to undress. 

For reasons the film doesn’t quite explain, the models are also members of the “Bizarro Enthusiast Club” led by Dr. Kano (Joji Oka) who is the head doctor at the psychiatric hospital from which the bloodsucking painter, Tsumura (Ren Yamamoto), escaped. Meanwhile, Dr. Kano also seems to have a sideline in taking the girls to remote locations for nude photoshoot parties. In all honesty, he’s quite suspicious especially seeing as he seems to instinctively know how to open the tricky door at the abandoned house where Keiko’s body is found. Then again, we’re also told that Tsumura was once a member of the club with at least some suggesting that he ended up getting too into the bizarre and going out of his mind to the extent that he began committing weird acts of crime of his own. 

The lesson might be that getting overly obsessed with the occult and esoteric is unhealthy, only it turns there’s something else going on entirely that isn’t really about anything “weird” but caused by completely banal negative human emotions resulting from spurned romantic interest and the fear of parental disappointment. This being a Kindaichi mystery, the famous detective soon makes his appearance (played by a hardboiled Seizaburo Kawazu) only in a less eccentric guise and accompanied by a more efficient Todoroki who assists him as he begins to put the pieces together to solve the mystery. 

The villain may be taking advantage of a historical moment in allowing others to think his face is bandaged to disguise a disfigurement like those of many men wounded in the war, as was the case in another Kindaichi case The Inugami Family, but is also harking back to the Invisible Man while his accomplice adopts a much more “monstrous” appearance with buck teeth and the two missing fingers on his hand along with the insectile movements that play into the spider-themed finale. Oda has a lot of fun with the villain’s Phantom of the Opera-esque antics which include recording a tape to taunt the police along with a public announcement of “Act 3” of his ongoing drama to be staged at the “Reijin Theatre” which literally means “the beautiful lady show” but is also a minor pun that makes it sound a little “Ghost Man Theatre” in true B-movie villain fashion. Even so, there’s an underlying darkness in the serial killer drama most particularly in the scrapbook the villain makes with photos of the dead women posed and titled as works of art as if they were never any more alive than the mannequins he often substitutes for them. Striking in its set pieces and unsettling design, Oda’s strange drama is surprisingly nasty and actually quite cynical even as it unmasks its villain as little more than a ghost of man who hid behind the spectre of unease to mask his cowardice and insecurity.